For Immediate Release

Contact:

Halifax/Ottawa, CANADA - - Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) and The Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program are pleased to announce that Dr. Patrick O'Neill has recently been awarded a prestigious Canada-U.S. Fulbright award. A leading scholar on Canadian theatre, Dr. O'Neill is a Professor of Speech and Drama at MSVU.

"The Canada-U.S. Fulbright award will allow Dr. O'Neill to advance his ideas in an extremely interesting field of research. Mount Saint Vincent University is proud to have a scholar of Dr. O'Neill's calibre on our faculty and we know that he will continue to bring great credit to the University," says Dr. Sheila A. Brown, President and Vice-Chancellor of MSVU.

Dr. O'Neill has published extensively and is a founding member of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and has served on the editorial board of Theatre Research in Canada and the Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. He is also the former Director of Research at MSVU.

As a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar, Dr. O'Neill has been invited to spend the fall semester as a visiting researcher at Curry College in Massachusetts, renowned for its strength in the area of speech and theatre.

"I am honoured to have received this award and I look forward to my tenure at Curry College," says Dr. O'Neill. "I will have a wealth of resources in the New England area and a collegial environment that will allow me to work on my research on the numerous theatrical companies who travelled to the Atlantic region from the New England states."

While in the United States, Dr. O'Neill will explore the historical relationship between Canadian and American theatre, particularly the development of theatre in New England and the Atlantic provinces. His research will contribute towards the development of a book on the history of theatre in Halifax.

"I am pleased to welcome Dr. O'Neill to the distinguished group of Canada- U.S. Fulbright scholars," says Dr. Michael K. Hawes, Executive Director of The Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program. "Dr. O'Neill's success brings tremendous credit to Mount Saint Vincent University and to the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program."

Last year, MSVU Professor of History and Political Studies, Dr. Reginald Stuart, became the University's first-ever Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar.

Long regarded as the world's premiere academic exchange program, the Fulbright Program attracts exceptional scholars from more than 150 countries world-wide. Among the fastest growing of the bilateral exchanges is the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program.

With the support of Foreign Affairs Canada, the United States Department of State and a host of private sector partners, the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program has engaged more than 600 scholars in high-level academic exchange since its inception in 1990.